[quote author=“Skipshot”]There is no reasoned or disciplined discussion with people who only want to tell you why you’re wrong. There is more peace when we do not engage closed minds such as Mr. Holding and Corte. They only want a fight.

What SkipShot said!! And the point that bRain524 made! Thanks for lots of laughs. The huge difference between Sam Harris and these characters is that Sam makes a great deal of sense with a surfeit of words. These guys just transparently want to baffle you with bullshit.

I am reminded of the old comedy routine whose origin I disrember and butcher below…

Little Bo Peep, has lost her sheep and doesn’t know where to find them, which is reasonable, reasonable to assume, given that she has lost them!

But, then…our author has the stupid audacity to say, Leave them alone!!
Well!, If Little Bo Peep had lost her sheep, she would have to leave them alone, wouldn’t she?!
It’s in the book.
Leave them alone and they’ll come home, oh yes, there will be a brighter day tomorrow, they will come home!
And, wagging their tails…..pray tell what else would they wag??......
BEHIND them! Behind them!....Did we think they would wag them in front??!! Or did they come home in reverse??? We don’t know.
In any event…It’s in the book!

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The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind, the ants are blowing in the wind.

Then I suppose you can provide non-biblical evidence of a first century Nazareth

I suppose you could explain to me why anyone in antiquity would find the need to write about a village of about 35 families that was not located on any major trade routes, and lived in the shadow of one of the largest and most prominent settlements in the country. You have an arguement from silence. That is it. You find me one archealogist that disputes that Nazereth existed and I will find 2 that believe it did.

proof that Eusebius didn’t forge the Testimonium Flavianum?

Logic isn’t your strong suit is it? You can’t prove a negative. Rephrase your question and we might have a discussion.

You see that is the problem when discussing things with ignorant atheists one always has to start from the ground up and teach them basic thinking skills before we could even move on to more complex issues.

Like Salt Creek’s sig says. “The amount of nonsense that one can know about nothing is infinite.”

There is no point in being dragged into these stupid arguments as to the details of these believers fantansies. Too many fantasies and too many details and none of them are with substance. The most unfortuneate thing about religion is the enormous waste of time it represents. No one has to be greek scholar to understand that the greek gods were myths. I don’t have to be a christian scholar to understand the same thing about chritianity. I insist on living in the modern world not the bronze age world.
Who cares whether Mt. Olympus or Nazereth ever existed?

What these characters call “critical thinking skills” are just the abilities to accept premises without foundation on which to build their fantasies. The ability to believe things that aren’t true. Sam Harris’s point is that the modern world can’t tolerate religious extremists who use their religious beliefs to justify bring barbarism into the modern world. These idiots will use a bizillion words to try to counter the few simple points that Sam Harris made with a handful of words.

JP writes:
Biblical passages support our thesis: Daniel 12:2 speaks not of everlasting pain, but of disgrace and everlasting contempt.

Way to go. Cite an unproven source for support of your hollow arguments. A variant of The bible is true because it says it is. What a lame appeal for authority via majority vote.

JP blathers on:
Now Mr. Harris, knowing your work as I do, I don’t expect you to present any sort of informed answer to this understanding. Since you are not interested in the truth,

Way to go. Word stuffing at its finest. Do you honestly think that any atheist is not interested in what is real or true? Your statement should have said

Since you are not interested in MY explanation of the Truth

What a bunch of trash.

[Sam Harris] says, “The fact that my continuous and public rejection of Christianity does not worry me in the least should suggest to you just how inadequate I think your reasons for being a Christian are. ” I wouldn’t doubt that. However, the fact that you manifest such primitive knowledge of Christianity means that I am not worried in the least about your rejection.

Nah, but feel free to post 15 page pro-christian diatribes here, on an atheist forum, with links of your strawman gnashings readily available to your flock so that they might not be steered away from your brainwashing tactics. No, you aren’t worried “in the least” at allllll.

JP writes:
For your information, I am not a Muslim because I have considered arguments for and against Islam and arrived at a rational decision.

And your “rational” decision is that Islam is wrong, Muslims are misguided.

If you have the nerve, you may wish to check with such sources as the Answering Islam (answering-islam.org) website, so that you may see that there is more to the matter than simply saying from your armchair, “gee, they have reasons too just like you do” or just waving off other people’s systems of beliefs as “absurd” without giving any form of argument.

Yet here on this very forum you dismiss Islam without giving any substantial argument as to why. uh, unless that link you gave is what you count as an argument. wow.

JP writes:
That is the method of the bigoted and the lazy who do not have the wherewithal to do any real arguing against truth claims. Is that what you are, Mr. Harris? A lazy bigot?

So, you spent a day at http://www.answering-islam.org which, upon a 5 minute review, is nothing more than a sock puppet website designed by rabid pro-christianity zealots—with preconceived notions and confirmation biases up the buttcrack—completely hell bent on proving islam is a false religion. Is this how you define intellectual honesty?

Salt Creek called me out for my psycho ramblings about Mormonism and I went away for a week to detox it out, best I could. He/ she was right. I got a tad too obsessive/ compulsive there with my spew. I got into a drunken rut there for a spell.

Thus I have girded up my loins, and have got my wits about me again and am trying to post sans reference (too terribly) to my former life as a cult member.

of course, look at me now, posting about the very topic I attempted to detox about. I am hopeless.

Noggin

post script: of course lemmy is god. No reason why not. If jesus can be god, then so can lemmy.

Salt Creek called me out for my psycho ramblings about Mormonism and I went away for a week to detox it out, best I could. He/ she was right. I got a tad too obsessive/ compulsive there with my spew. I got into a drunken rut there for a spell.

How so Noggin? I think that your psycho ramblings are pretty instructive. I’m somewhat self interested, having lost family members to it. But also, I think that mormonism is one of the most fascinating belief systems to study. It’s so virulent and so “latter day”.

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The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind, the ants are blowing in the wind.

I think largely because no matter how much you “spew” about it, you can’t figure it out. It is nonsense. Read my tag line. Again.

Better you should figure out why people are so susceptible to nonsense. This is something I am still investigating, but with less enthusiasm as total global religious war draws nearer. Get it?

Hey, of course I get it. I shy away from these deep discussions concerning the details or the doctrines or the changing belief of any of these religions. I’m like you, it’s all beside the point, and I’ve always liked your sig line because of it.

Apparently Noggin also agrees with this view, but has not had the fortune to come to it by the same route that you are I might have taken. His path neccessarily involved some deep immersion in some deep sh**. Moreover, he is only free of this only relatively recently. In many way, mormons especially never can totally leave it. Their extended family are hung up in it and they have practiced and participated deeply to an extent that few other religions actually hew. Think of the beehive. Leaving church can be like a lone bee leaving the hive.

I’m impressed with what it takes to break free of something like that. I’ve never experienced any of that, have you?

I think that part of breaking free is to go over your dogma, pick through your beliefs, sift through the logic, come to grips with the realilty that is so at odds with everything you’ve ever been told. Mia wrote something to this effect once. Each simple rational revelation serves as a foothold to move forward and finally defeat the belief. Deconstruct is the word that Noggin used.

Also the have to come to grips with how much they themselves parcipated in propagating the nonsense and how the nonsense can be seen to be harmful to some, especially true lately of the mormons and their deep past connection with polygamy.

I think the mormons are a great study for a few reasons,
they are latter day, the information as to their origins and history is available and even un-controversial, except for the unbelieveable parts.
What the mormons believe is completely and transparently outrageous. By way of contrast with other religions, the mormon religion is an original american fake. Joeseph Smith was a huckster that stumbled into a gold mine when he learned to exploit the ignorance of his contemporaries. He was a fake and he knew it.
The other thing about mormonism is how virulent it is. Even though the mormon “theology” is so transparently crazy, people who are infected, go down hard! That includes people who are infected later in life.
Anyway, I don’t know of what kind of exchange you had with Noggin, but I don’t have any problem if he obsesses now and then. I learn a lot, not the details of the religion, but what happens to people who go into and out of it. This apostasy thing is so much harder on them to. They get separated from their loved ones and thrown into the outer darkness. :shock:
Gotta cut a guy a little slack if he suffering from post traumatic stress.

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The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind, the ants are blowing in the wind.

I suppose you could explain to me why anyone in antiquity would find the need to write about a village of about 35 families that was not located on any major trade routes, and lived in the shadow of one of the largest and most prominent settlements in the country. You have an arguement from silence. That is it. You find me one archealogist that disputes that Nazereth existed and I will find 2 that believe it did.

I really hate wasting time on these trivial points that have been settled for years, but here’s a place for you to start:

Yes, it’s an atheist web site, but that doesn’t diminish the truth of the message. There are plenty of follow-on links you can reference, I suggest you start with the monks doing all the digging.

While you are at it, perhaps you can find out why Origen categorically stated that Josephus did NOT regard Jesus as the Christ. If the TF had been present, Origen never would have made that statement.

Your christ myth is full of mis-interpretations of the Greek old testament made by whoever wrote the gospels in the late first and early second centuries. “Nazareth” is merely another mistake, like the alleged slaughter of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt. Fairy tales all.

It never ceases to amaze me what lengths the deluded will go to to sustain the delusion. No amount of evidence is ever sufficient to overcome the conditioning, ‘cause you could never face the consequences of being wrong. The only thing I regret is that you will never realize your mistake, ‘cause when the lights go out, they go out.